I guess this is better then nothing as a quick fix, a very mild improvement over simply shutting off/rebooting the phone. But Apple has the elements in place fo

I guess this is better then nothing as a quick fix, a very mild improvement over simply shutting off/rebooting the phone. But Apple has the elements in place for much, much more effective methods such as a touch-based coercion code system. While in current stock iOS any finger registered with Touch ID is equivalent from a user's perspective, internally all of them are registered as separate events. Via jailbreaking it has therefore been possible to have different actions triggered by different fingers, which allowed a normal Touch ID action to additionally run any script, reboot the phone, or even wipe the phone, with zero apparent trigger by the user. Now that jailbreaking is mostly dead that's no longer an option, but Apple could of course implement this even better, with both Touch ID and actual alternative passcode options. Apple could offer not merely disable/wipe options, but more transparent hiding (via encryption) of apps and data a user deems sensitive. This is one area where the extremely heavily sandboxed nature of iOS and hardware key system offers a significant potential advantage not merely to infosec but to opsec as well. It is far more feasible to hide sensitive data without leaving fingerprints or shadows in other apps or the system itself. Temporal and geographic location conditions could also be taken into account as possible triggers in intuitive and user friendly ways. Of course, if bandwidth is known to be sufficient on each end of a trip, a "high risk area transit mode" that completely clears the device of all data except user-designated travel essentials (wallet, ticket information and such) could be another option. If WiFi sync/restore was fixed to be more reliable then users and organizations could even do that themselves via VPN back to their own core systems. At any rate I hope Apple gets more aggressive here, the potential is exciting and they're in a real position to do a lot of good for personal privacy, and critically in a way that's highly accessible to even non-technical users. This isn't even remotely just about corrupt or overbearing law enforcement either, in many parts of the world "high risk" applies to a lot of other trips where one might encounter criminal elements. Just as one wouldn't carry tens of thousands in cash through those areas or even debit cards with access to the same, carrying any other device that's a close equivalent is a bad idea, yet a smartphone is also a powerful safety and communication tool at the same time. If effectively it can use temporal, geographic and user-memory stored conditions to change itself on the fly that'd be great.